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Varroa survival in dead-outs

Many sources of information on the varroa life cycle are surprisingly vague about this, but it seems that varroa do not perist in egg form outside a living colony. In other words, for them to carry on year over year in the same colony, it has to have live bees/brood in it to sustain some adult varroa. Therefore, if the colony dies entirely, all the adult varroa presumably die...my concern was that re-used comb might contain varroa eggs that could infect other bees. Not possible? Of course there may be varroa-transmitted viruses and a whole constellation of other stuff on those combs, some desirable , some not. But as far as varroa is concerned, there should be no carry-over from dead-out equipment??

Re: Varroa survival in dead-outs

You will notice the female varroa destructor doesn't start to lay eggs until after she has already started engorging herself on prepupa blood after day nine. Day nine and day 10 is when workers/drones sping their cocoon. Day 11 is when first varroa egg is laid. That stated logic only shows the cells in which the eggs are laid are already capped thus trapping the mites in the cocoon until the bee emerges. Because the mites are trapped in the cell with the larva by the cocoon then all eggs will be hatched by the time the bee emerges. Therefore you will have no worries about unhatched varroa eggs in deadouts.

Re: Varroa survival in dead-outs

If you get a bee package and no comb or brood is that a good time to vapourizer or use some sort of varroa treatment. Try to start clean or are package so stressed at that time that treatments will kill them..including kill the Queen?

Re: Varroa survival in dead-outs

There was a paper put out by some university where tests were conducted with very good results on the spraying of packages with a OA and sugar solution. I would think that OA vapour would give better results with less stress on the package. If I had known this at the time I got my first packages I would have OA treated them before hiving and saved myself a lot of trouble as I am sure the mite population in my yards was imported with the bees.
Johno